Google+ says Truman Capote, dead 28 years, now writes for the NYT

Algorithm linking authors to stories credits late novelist with Times article.

If you ever scan links in Google News search results, you might have noticed articles paired with the names and photos of the authors who wrote them. Those are links to the authors' Google+ profiles, part of Google's attempt to bake its social network into all the ways you interact with Google services.

If an author hasn't taken steps to connect their stories to a Google+ profile, the story link in Google search results isn't paired with a Google+ page—except when Google's sometimes overactive algorithms take matters into their own hands. That's what just happened with a New York Times story about abortion, which was credited to Truman Capote—the famous author of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood who died in 1984:

That was enough for Google results to show Truman Capote as the author of the story and provide a link to a Truman Capote account someone made on Google+ (which now seems to have been deleted). You would have seen the odd pairing of article and author if you were searching Google for abortion-related stories, but Google has now fixed things on the backend such that Capote is no longer credited as the NYT article author.

In a statement to Search Engine Land, a Google spokesperson said, “We want to help users see who’s writing the content they find on the Web and engage directly with authors. To that end, earlier this year we began algorithmically identifying authors in some cases. We still encourage authors to add explicit authorship markup and verify their email addresses to provide the most comprehensive and accurate data.”

I've seen numerous Ars articles attributed in Google results to the wrong authors, but in those cases they were at least attributed to another Ars author. With Google increasing automatic pairing of articles and authors, it's likely the Capote mistake won't be the last. But for sheer strangeness, it will be hard to top Google crediting an article to someone who died 27 years before Google+ existed.

I kind of feel that with Google's ability to deep-link to things it would be able to also check links going to that article for references to author and see what they also say if multiple names appear within a byline. A quick link search on google returns at least one article using her name as a reference for the link.

I love that last thing you mentioned - when the algorithm can't find the author it wants in Google+, so it just picks some other site author at random rather than just leaving well enough alone. Seems like you'd want to err on the side of caution when it came to attributing news stories to people?